RESTLESS SPIRIT:

The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange...

November 01, 1998|By Mary Harris Russell. Mary Harris Russell, who teaches English at Indiana University Northwest, reviews children's books each week for the Tribune.

RESTLESS SPIRIT: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange

By Elizabeth Partridge

Viking (ages 10-14), $18.99

Young readers may be familiar with some of Dorothea Lange's most-famous images, of Depression-era migrant workers, but this book shows us the life on the other end of the camera lens. Elizabeth Partridge doesn't make Lange into either a model child or a saintly adult. From her childhood in Hoboken, N.J., to her last years in Berkeley, Calif., she was a determined individualist. Her mother insisted that she go to a teacher-training institute, but on her first day of student teaching, she was so unable to control the students that they all climbed out the fire escape and went to the playground. But she knew what she wanted to do and turned to photography. Of equal interest to young readers may be her struggles with her children and with a domestic world that sometimes was a restful haven for her but that often stood in the way of her getting work done. There is good detail on her work with various federal agencies, as well as a sense of both her husbands, especially of the supportive care of her second, Paul Taylor. This book brings not only Lange but also tumultuous years of social change to life.

IF YOU COME SOFTLY

By Jacqueline Woodson

Putnam (ages 10 and up), $15.99

Taking its title from an Audre Lorde poem, this novel tells many tales at once. Teenagers in love, families in transition, a comfortable sector of society that doesn't want to see any of its unthinking daily prejudices. Some readers may hear echoes of "Romeo and Juliet" and "West Side Story," but young readers won't feel there are any mechanical allusions here. Ellie, who is white, and Jeremiah, who is black, are both starting at Percy, a Manhattan prep school, this year. Surely their liberal families won't have any trouble with their romance. Ellie's family has already accepted an older sister's being a lesbian, and Jeremiah's parents, now separated, are a famous filmmaker and a writer. The tension concerning the interracial romance comes from within each adolescent, and is tangled with their own sense of identity and the fault lines in their own families. Jacqueline Woodson's portrait of Ellie's older sister, who does not automatically provide support, is particularly strong. The ending is sad, which readers know from the first chapter, but the power of Woodson's writing is that we still keep turning the pages.

KNOTS IN MY YO-YO STRING

By Jerry Spinelli

Knopf (ages 10-14), $15.99

In the last chapter of this memoir of childhood, the adult Jerry Spinelli is asked by a boy: "Do you think being a kid helped you to become a writer?" This book is a brilliant answer to that good question. Many adults may have had childhoods similar to Spinelli's, but most of them aren't writers, with Spinelli's flair for relating a particular incident, or memories of awkwardness and emotion, or what made us unusual and what made us ordinary. Young readers who've liked any of the Newbery medalist's earlier books will enjoy this one, because it provides children serious dignity while they see what is both humorous and solemn about growing up in a grown-up world. Reading earlier Spinelli, however, isn't absolutely necessary for finding his renderings of the 9th-grade prom painfully vivid. He's a master of knowing what to leave out, and he's honest: about not being a reader, about the racial divisions in his hometown, about his skill at sports. People of all ages and sexes will enjoy this.